Master of None season 2 premieres on Netflix on May 12, and Dev and his friends are back for more life lessons, and more pasta.

When Master of None returns for its second season, nearly 18 months after its first, don’t expect much to have changed for Dev, Arnold and the world they live in. In fact, everything has changed.

‘Master of None’ season 2 review

Dev, created and portrayed by Master of None co-creator and executive producer, (and writer and director) Aziz Ansari, is back for a second round of this strange, wonderful, show. He is once again holding court about love, friendship, and every other kind of connection, over bowls of pasta and glasses of red wine.

The exploratory nature the show undertook in season 1 is amplified over these new 10 episodes.

Everything feels familiar. Arnold (Eric Wareheim) is still the strange yin to Dev’s yang. But he gets a more established role in the show – including a DJ set and a inopportunely timed meltdown. Denise (Lena Waithe) is still the bluntly honest, tell-it-like-it-is character. But she is given the time to shine in an such a phenomenal episode, it will certainly be this season’s “Parents.”

Self-contained, you can play any episode in any random order and be dropped into the story with no beats missed. But watch them linearly for maximum appreciation of the nuanced performances. Or, you can look at these 10 episodes as one long story, pieced together to analyze and evaluate humans with a microscopic lens connected by a massive telescope.

Master of None is a calm show. Even when there’s yelling, there’s a sense of quiet serenity to it.

When Dev’s parents (aka, Aziz’s real-life parents reprising their roles) are forced to accept their son doesn’t follow all the rules and traditions of their religion, they get upset, but it never boils over into all-out anger. That’s okay. That’s good. Television today is so much about extremes, it’s refreshing to see a show that can be so adventurous and take risks, while still staying very grounded to the what feels like the truth.

It’s a comedy that treats itself as a drama, and is infinitely better each time it remembers that.

If Seinfeld pioneered the idea of a show based on observational humor, Ansari, Alan Yang (fellow co-creator and executive producer and writer and director) and their team have created a show that relies on observational humor plus a step further into introspective humor, whatever that may be called.

One of the appeals of Master of None is that viewers can identify with so many elements of the show. As a 20-something living in New York City, I might be a half life-phase younger than Dev, Arnold and Denise, but I still painfully relate to the plights depicted during particularly expansive episodes. Dating is exhausting in NYC. (It is, let’s be real, exhausting anywhere.) You swipe right and left, sometimes in places you shouldn’t be swiping at all, and you match with handfuls of strangers at a time.

Then, like Dev, you set up a few dates at the “great wine bar a few blocks away.” From there, you vet. You vet until the Uber pulls up to the first stop’s door. And when you kiss goodnight, you vet to invite them up for another drink, or you resign and let them sit back in the car and replay the last two hours on their way back to their residence. Master of None forces you to sit in this space for beats longer than you’d expect a TV show to do, and it works.

This show is exactly what it needs to be at this moment. Poignant. Funny. Heartfelt. Crushing. Passionate.

I didn’t grow up going over to my best friend’s house for Thanksgiving, as Dev did with Denise, but I did grow up with traditions. With the standards and staples that come with an annual holiday, and also notes of the passage of time. The fashion changes, how we talk about once-vexed topics such as smoking pot and sexuality evolve, but there’s something inherently familiar about gathering around a table year after year. Master of None captures that notion brilliantly within a 30-minute timeframe.

On the whole, Master of None‘s magic superpower, it seems, is condensing worlds of ideas and beliefs into its episode allotment.

Watching Master of None season 2 isn’t escapism TV, because you don’t escape it. You embrace it.